Recent from talks
College and university rankings
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
College and university rankings
College and university rankings order higher education institutions based on various criteria, with factors differing depending on the specific ranking system. These rankings can be conducted at the national or international level, assessing institutions within a single country, within a specific geographical region, or worldwide. Rankings are typically conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academics.
In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Some rankings consider measures of wealth, excellence in research, selective admissions, and alumni success. Rankings may also consider various combinations of measures of specialization expertise, student options, award numbers, internationalization, graduate employment, industrial linkage, historical reputation and other criteria.
The interpretation, accuracy, and usefulness of rankings have been criticized. The expanding diversity in rating methodologies and accompanying criticisms of each indicate the lack of consensus in the field. Further, it seems possible to game the ranking systems through excessive self-citations or by researchers supporting each other in surveys.
UNESCO has even questioned whether rankings "do more harm than good," noting that while "Rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a measure of quality and so create intense competition between universities all over the world".
Critics argue that rankings can divert universities' attention away from teaching and social responsibility towards the type of scientific research valued by indicators used for ranking exercises. There have also been concerns that by applying a limited set of criteria to world universities, and given the strong desire to feature in the top 200 universities, rankings actually encourage the homogenization of higher education institutions, making them less responsive and less relevant to their immediate contexts. The fact that rankings are also said to favour the advantage enjoyed by the 200 best-ranked institutions has important implications for equity.
Several organizations produce worldwide university rankings, including the following. The three longest established and most influential global rankings are those produced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (the Academic Ranking of World Universities; ARWU). All of these, along with other global rankings, primarily measure the research performance of universities rather than their teaching. They have been criticized for being "largely based on what can be measured rather than what is necessarily relevant and important to the university", and the validity of the data available globally has been questioned. As of 2021, across the three most popular global rankings, "the majority of the top-ten globally ranked institutions are located in southern England, California, the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), and nearby Massachusetts."
While some rankings attempt to measure teaching using metrics such as staff to student ratio, the Higher Education Policy Institute has pointed out that the metrics used are more closely related to research than teaching quality, e.g. "Staff to student ratios are an almost direct measure of research activity", and "The proportion of PhD students is also to a large extent an indication of research activity". Inside Higher Ed similarly states "these criteria do not actually measure teaching, and none even come close to assessing the quality of impact". Many rankings are also considered to contain biases towards the natural sciences and, due to the bibliometric sources used, towards publication in English-language journals. Some rankings, including ARWU, also fail to make any correction for the sizes of institutions, so a large institution is ranked considerably higher than a small institution with the same quality of research. Other compilers, such as Scimago and U.S. News & World Report, use a mix of size-dependent and size-independent metrics.
Some compilers, notably QS, THE, and U.S. News, use reputational surveys. The validity of these has been criticized: "Most experts are highly critical of the reliability of simply asking a rather unrandom group of educators and others involved with the academic enterprise for their opinions"; "methodologically [international surveys of reputation] are flawed, effectively they only measure research performance and they skew the results in favor of a small number of institutions."
Hub AI
College and university rankings AI simulator
(@College and university rankings_simulator)
College and university rankings
College and university rankings order higher education institutions based on various criteria, with factors differing depending on the specific ranking system. These rankings can be conducted at the national or international level, assessing institutions within a single country, within a specific geographical region, or worldwide. Rankings are typically conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academics.
In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Some rankings consider measures of wealth, excellence in research, selective admissions, and alumni success. Rankings may also consider various combinations of measures of specialization expertise, student options, award numbers, internationalization, graduate employment, industrial linkage, historical reputation and other criteria.
The interpretation, accuracy, and usefulness of rankings have been criticized. The expanding diversity in rating methodologies and accompanying criticisms of each indicate the lack of consensus in the field. Further, it seems possible to game the ranking systems through excessive self-citations or by researchers supporting each other in surveys.
UNESCO has even questioned whether rankings "do more harm than good," noting that while "Rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a measure of quality and so create intense competition between universities all over the world".
Critics argue that rankings can divert universities' attention away from teaching and social responsibility towards the type of scientific research valued by indicators used for ranking exercises. There have also been concerns that by applying a limited set of criteria to world universities, and given the strong desire to feature in the top 200 universities, rankings actually encourage the homogenization of higher education institutions, making them less responsive and less relevant to their immediate contexts. The fact that rankings are also said to favour the advantage enjoyed by the 200 best-ranked institutions has important implications for equity.
Several organizations produce worldwide university rankings, including the following. The three longest established and most influential global rankings are those produced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (the Academic Ranking of World Universities; ARWU). All of these, along with other global rankings, primarily measure the research performance of universities rather than their teaching. They have been criticized for being "largely based on what can be measured rather than what is necessarily relevant and important to the university", and the validity of the data available globally has been questioned. As of 2021, across the three most popular global rankings, "the majority of the top-ten globally ranked institutions are located in southern England, California, the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), and nearby Massachusetts."
While some rankings attempt to measure teaching using metrics such as staff to student ratio, the Higher Education Policy Institute has pointed out that the metrics used are more closely related to research than teaching quality, e.g. "Staff to student ratios are an almost direct measure of research activity", and "The proportion of PhD students is also to a large extent an indication of research activity". Inside Higher Ed similarly states "these criteria do not actually measure teaching, and none even come close to assessing the quality of impact". Many rankings are also considered to contain biases towards the natural sciences and, due to the bibliometric sources used, towards publication in English-language journals. Some rankings, including ARWU, also fail to make any correction for the sizes of institutions, so a large institution is ranked considerably higher than a small institution with the same quality of research. Other compilers, such as Scimago and U.S. News & World Report, use a mix of size-dependent and size-independent metrics.
Some compilers, notably QS, THE, and U.S. News, use reputational surveys. The validity of these has been criticized: "Most experts are highly critical of the reliability of simply asking a rather unrandom group of educators and others involved with the academic enterprise for their opinions"; "methodologically [international surveys of reputation] are flawed, effectively they only measure research performance and they skew the results in favor of a small number of institutions."
Recent media